Enterprise Value Calculator

This calculator adds together everything a buyer would need to settle to own a company outright: market capitalization, plus total debt, preferred stock, and minority interest, minus cash and cash equivalents already sitting on the balance sheet. Investopedia and Wall Street Prep both converge on the same formula: EV = market capitalization + total debt + preferred stock + minority interest − cash and cash equivalents.

Net debt is the bridge: total debt plus preferred stock plus minority interest, minus cash and cash equivalents. A company with $95 million in debt, no preferred stock, no minority interest, and $60 million in cash carries $35 million of net debt. Add that to market capitalization and the result is enterprise value.

Divide enterprise value by EBITDA and the result is the enterprise value to EBITDA ratio, shortened to EV/EBITDA or the EBITDA multiple; some analysts call it the enterprise multiple, and the math behind both names is identical.

EBITDA stands for earnings before interest expense, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, adding each of those four items back to net income, the same route Wall Street Prep and Omni Calculator both describe. Pull the trailing twelve-month figure from the company's own income statement. A press release headline number is often rounded and won't match it.

Equity value and enterprise value answer different questions. Equity value, the market capitalization figure by itself, is what a shareholder's stake is worth.

Enterprise value adds the debt a buyer would inherit & subtracts the cash a buyer would immediately pocket. That prices the total value of the operating business, debt and equity combined, so two companies financed differently still compare on equal footing. Read between the lines of a "cheap" market cap and the debt load can tell a different story.

Preferred stock and minority interest matter mainly for companies carrying them. Preferred stock ranks above common equity in a liquidation; minority interest represents the slice of a consolidated subsidiary the parent doesn't own outright. Leave both at zero for a straightforward public company.

Take a hypothetical company with a $420 million market capitalization, $95 million in total debt, $60 million in cash and cash equivalents, no preferred stock, and no minority interest. Net debt comes to $35 million: $95 million minus $60 million. Add that to market capitalization and enterprise value lands at $455 million: $420 million plus $35 million.

Now bring in EBITDA. The company reported $52 million in trailing twelve-month EBITDA. Enterprise value divided by EBITDA, $455 million divided by $52 million, works out to an 8.75x EBITDA multiple.

Check it the other direction. An 8.75x multiple against $52 million in EBITDA reproduces the same $455 million enterprise value, and subtracting the $35 million of net debt lands back on the original $420 million market capitalization. The math closes both ways, exactly what the calculator above runs live as you change any input. Cut corners on any one figure, market cap, debt, or cash, and the multiple stops meaning anything.

Compare the deal-making version of this math. MSCI's 2023 purchase of a 66% stake in Burgiss implied a total enterprise value close to $1.06 billion against roughly $90 million in projected revenue, an EBITDA multiple Morningstar rounded to "over 70 times" once Burgiss's mid-teens EBITDA margin got worked into the math (MSCI's Burgiss acquisition).

That's a private, high-growth data business trading nowhere near the 8.75x above, which is why analysts check a multiple against comparable companies in the same sector before trusting it.

EV/EBITDA is a valuation ratio meant for comparison, useful only against a peer or a sector average. Enterprise value corrects for capital structure, but it says nothing about the underlying business's real worth, and two companies posting the same 8.75x EBITDA multiple can carry different quality of earnings underneath that identical number.

EBITDA adds back depreciation and amortization, which hides how capital-intensive a business is. A software company and a manufacturer can report the same EBITDA figure while the manufacturer needs a much larger slice of that number reinvested in equipment just to keep running.

Capital expenditures show that gap, so check them separately before trusting an EBITDA multiple across industries. EBITDA also stands in for operating cash flow sometimes, but the two aren't identical: EBITDA skips the working capital swings a real cash flow statement captures.

There's no single "good" EBITDA multiple. Wall Street Prep puts it plainly: "there are no set rules on what determines a low or high EV/EBITDA valuation multiple because the answer is contingent on the industry," naming a 10x multiple that reads as high for a consumer goods company & low for a software company.

Data from NYU Stern's Aswath Damodaran, current as of January 2026, backs that up at the sector level: system and application software companies were trading at an average EV/EBITDA multiple of 24.48x against 17.38x for general retail and 13.73x for utilities (Damodaran, NYU Stern). Par for the course in one sector reads as an outlier in another.

Debt and cash figures go stale the moment a company reports them. A quarterly filing is a snapshot, and enterprise value calculated from it drifts further from reality the longer a deal takes to close, the way Thoma Bravo's $8.0 billion all-cash purchase of Coupa priced against balance sheet figures already weeks old by close. Pull the most recent 10-Q or 10-K figures. A number that shows up first in a search result is often already stale.

Minority interest and preferred stock, when a target company carries either, need their own line item pulled from the filing. Folding them into "other debt" understates enterprise value by exactly the amount left out.

Market capitalization usually has the biggest effect on the calculator's result, since it's typically the largest figure in the formula. Total debt and cash and cash equivalents come next & often move in opposite directions on the same balance sheet, which is why the combined net debt figure is worth double-checking. Pull both from the same financial data source so the figures reconcile; get either one wrong and the process of sizing the money at stake goes with it.

Use the balance sheet figure at face value: cash, short-term investments, and marketable securities convertible within roughly ninety days. Restricted cash in escrow or loan collateral doesn't behave the same way; the calculator above assumes an unrestricted figure.

In a nutshell, there isn't one number that works across every industry. Compare a company's EBITDA multiple against direct competitors in the same sector, since a flat benchmark ignores how much multiples vary by industry. The NYU Stern sector data above puts software companies at roughly 24x and utilities at roughly 14x, a gap wide enough that a single "good multiple" rule would mislead on one side or the other.

The ratio works best for mature companies with stable, comparable capital structures. Loss-making companies and businesses with negative or near-zero EBITDA break it outright, since dividing by a number close to zero produces a meaningless multiple. It also misleads across capital structures within the same industry when one company's EBITDA got inflated by unusual add-backs. A filing's footnotes spell out those add-backs. The headline EBITDA figure won't show them.

Drop this on any page and it renders the calculator above, live, no login or install required. It's free to use; the only ask is leaving the credit link in place.